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TELLING TIME: Order

Before beginning this exercise read:

"Fiction is the art of making time legible," a student once remarked. She had just discovered time as one of the great pleasures of fiction, falling literally in love with the fluidity of it, its range and possibility, the ease with which, in language, we ate able to move through the history of a family or a century in a single breath.

Time: a wave, a digitized frame, a dizzying loop, parallel universes, loss, telling stories. Writers write about losing all sense of time when they are writing; we are in real-time (time is passing as we work); even as we work out the magic and complexities of narrative time. In writing time; the past conflates with the present; the future is as knowable as anything else. Time passes.

This exercise explores a typology of time, originally described by the French theorist, Gerard Genette. This typology, derived according to principles of order, frequency and duration, is highly useful for thinking and talking about how we organize time in our stories.

We begin with order, a principle that describes the sequence of events, which are either chronological (in order), or achronological (out of order). In achronological narratives, the temporal order may be altered by moving either backward (called a flashback, or what structuralists call an analepsis) or forward (a flashforward, or prolepsis). Such movements may be contained by, or extend beyond the time frame represented by, the primary narrative, which itself may be organized around a present moment, from which the rest of the time fragments eddy.

In other words, in fiction, we can think back, look forward, loop around a particular event, elide another, swoop and swirl. One moment, you can be in your mother's kitchen, worrying about how, now that your mother is older, she keeps forgetting things. In the next moment, you may be a child again, approaching your mother in a moment of crisis, torn between hope and dread, because, really, you did not mean to soften your clay on the heat register. You did not mean to throw the rock for your sister to squirt with the hose, the rock looping mysteriously back, as if with a mind of its own, toward the new car's windshield. You did not mean to wear your ring to play in the dirt pile. And of course in fiction, in yet another moment, you may be standing by your mother's grave, which you cannot yet bear to imagine, so maybe you write it instead.

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For this exercise, imagine a story as a series of plain events in a linear sequence, unfolding from the past toward the present, pushing forward. Make it simple.

For example: Two high school girls are friends. One lives in town with parents who are professionals, the other on a small ranch where she keeps a few horses. The ranch is a poor one, and the girl's father works also as a mechanic to make ends meet. Both girls love the cloudy, wind-swept autumn days that roil over their scrubby foothills and shock everything with the acrid scent of impending rain. On one such day, they take the horses out and get lost. In the late afternoon, they find themselves on the edge of the lake, much farther than they have ever gone before. It will be midnight before they get back, but for now, they sit on a red clay beach and look out over the choppy water. As they eat their smashed sandwiches, the girl from town watches her friend; she thinks about how different their lives are and how much she loves her. By the time they get back, everyone is worried and both know they will never ride together again.

Now, rewrite your story achronologically by choosing a present moment from which to narrate it, moving back and forth from this present moment but always returning to it. Such a present moment may be a particularly charged one, or it may simply function as a narrative anchor. Around it, past and future extend in separate branches.

In the above story, for example, that present moment might be the red clay beach. From there, a series of flashbacks might emphasize the girls' lack of such basic preparation as adequate water and maps, or their day-long growing feeling of becoming lost. The narrative might also look forward to adult lives, characterized by inchoate loss.

Alternatively, the ride itself might function as a present moment for a story that extends beyond the boundaries of that ride, looking back to how the girls' friendship began in biology lab, bonded over dissected frogs, and went on to flourish in marching band. It could also look forward to how their lives increasingly diverged. Or both.

In your own story, now add all new material by going back even further in time than the original sequence of events, some particular moment from childhood, say, that refracts the current narrative in interesting ways. Return to this moment once or several times. How does this extension affect the original story?

Alternatively (or, additionally), imagine a future event, or sequence of events, and write them into your story. If your story is first person, this will take the form of imagination, or conjecture; if in third, your narrator can project beyond what the characters know.

Variation (for future reference, not for this class exercise).

Rewrite your original story in reverse chronological order, paying particular attention to variations in nuance as the sequence inverts itself.

Note.

A general rule for temporal transition is the less said, the better.

White space works well, as do simple phrases such as later, or when she was ten. Remember, this is language. The arc of a single sentence can move time with grace and at will.

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